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Slightly tangential, and this might be controversial, but hear me out. I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successf

Slightly tangential, and this might be controversial, but hear me out. I think we need an alternative to DNS as we know it. Here in India, millions of successful business owners have never heard of DNS. They run profitable enterprises entirely through WhatsApp and use social media pages for their marketing presence. The reason is straightforward: social media platforms have made it incredibly easy to establish an online presence. These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them. This pattern extends globally. Remember when celebrities maintained their own websites a decade ago? Today, most have abandoned personal sites in favor of social media followings in the millions. The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people, so they gravitate toward walled gardens. While this creates platform dependency issues, it also reveals a fundamental UX problem with how we've structured the web's addressing system. Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users, rather than expecting everyone to become amateur system administrators.

justsomehnguy 1y ago
> These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them. Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.
- immibis 1y ago
  As long as only a minority of businesses lose their access to WhatsApp, they'll just be outcompeted by ones who follow Facebook's law over India's law. I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
  - justsomehnguy 1y ago
    > I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of busine AGREE WITH NUANCE Yep, any form of SNS is just a convenience for them and not the main method of interaction with clients. But for some of them it is the main method and for them losing the access could be quite devastating.
trashburger 1y ago
I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- quaintdev 1y ago
  > I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    To be fair, we're not talking about millions here, it's genuinely billions. Easily half of the world's population now have internet access, and vanishingly few ever manage to scale the walls of the beautiful gardens big companies graciously built for them.
- Clood5 1y ago
  [dead]
- anang 1y ago
  Isn't that the idea behind an alternative to DNS? I think OP meant that we need a similar system based on clear rules and international cooperation for social media, in addition to host names.
- thrance 1y ago
  > ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.
tmountain 1y ago
This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.
- Clood5 1y ago
  [dead]
kmacdough 1y ago
But you still get the same problem, no? Limited good WhatsApp handles. Just domains are older, more common internationally and have had longer to be hoarded.
- immibis 1y ago
  WhatsApp doesn't have handles. Only phone numbers. You print the phone number on a big sign on the front of your business, underneath the name of the business. If your phone number changes, you get a new sign or paint over it.
ahartmetz 1y ago
That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned). There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/
mrweasel 1y ago
AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies. In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you. I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem. On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number. Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.
qwertox 1y ago
In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them. One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads). They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things. Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this. [0] https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/ https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/
- mkmk 1y ago
  This is exactly the stuff that prevents innovation and drives entrepreneurs out of those economies. Physical address?!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - oceanhaiyang 1y ago
    Huh? Why would that be harmful at all??
    - croes 1y ago
      Entrepreneurs hate responsibility
      - eadmund 1y ago
        I imagine that most people hate random Internet crazies showing up at their homes. When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.
jiehong 1y ago
That’s a great point. Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once. Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?
anshumankmr 1y ago
Well if you are a Jeremy Renner fan, there was just the app for you...
rkagerer 1y ago
Social media platforms aren't the answer, they're the crutch. What you've described tells me it needs to be more straightforward to establish and grow your online presence on a foundation you control (or at least one where the owner has some true accountability to you).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
doctorhandshake 1y ago
With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things. I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-glass https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...
- sigilis 1y ago
  As you get older, or if you get injured or disfigured, what happens? Does your "face card" get declined?
  - doctorhandshake 1y ago
    I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.
    - Reubachi 1y ago
      PKI infra and public trust CAs support this already via vetted identity certs. Nowadays these certs require picture ID from some determined compliant government org. IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue. All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.
croes 1y ago
Given the recent US administration that‘s a bad idea. With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy
oaiey 1y ago
Maybe we should register social media handles into the DNS. Then you can advertise your domain and smoothly transition to them. Not exactly solving this, but handles are equally important than web server ip addressses or mail exchange ip addresses.
- FireInsight 1y ago
  Bluesky is a great working example of this.
James_K 1y ago
The argument that DNS is too hard doesn't really appeal to me. There are a billion and one WYSIWYG websites that let you register a domain and host some static site on it, all from one convenient web interface. I see loads of adverts all over the place for things like Squarespace and Wix. There's nothing hard to grasp about DNS if you offer it to users in an intuitive way. I imagine if Meta gave users a button that let them rent out a domain and have it redirect to their Facebook page, then many would take it up. There are a lot of people already using services like linktr.ee, so I can imagine a market for tying that page to a domain. I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.
9dev 1y ago
The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough. It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy. The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.
0x00cl 1y ago
This is such a weird take. This is not a problem per se on the technical level. > Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine. Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.
_fat_santa 1y ago
To all the folks saying this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't put your trust in big tech companies: you're absolutely right but also wrong. This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well. Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.
carlosjobim 1y ago
> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc. Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.
capitalatrisk 1y ago
I'm very interested to learn more about these WhatsApp only businesses, maybe it could be replicated in the West. Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?

justsomehnguy 1y ago

> These entrepreneurs don't care about domain ownership – an Instagram profile with substantial followers represents real business success to them. Yes. Until they lose their SNS handle for whatever reason and then they find out what some of them actually do care.

immibis 1y ago
As long as only a minority of businesses lose their access to WhatsApp, they'll just be outcompeted by ones who follow Facebook's law over India's law. I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of business that prints a number on its sign out the front, anyway. If it does change, you could go back to the business and read the sign again.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
  > I doubt there's much need for long-term number stability in the type of busine AGREE WITH NUANCE Yep, any form of SNS is just a convenience for them and not the main method of interaction with clients. But for some of them it is the main method and for them losing the access could be quite devastating.

trashburger 1y ago

I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies who will take it away at the first sight of something they don't like with zero (legal or otherwise) recourse, sometimes in an entirely automated manner. Like it or not, ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be (even though Tier1 ISPs can be easily pressured into dropping/blackholing by activists, and some of them are activists themselves).

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
quaintdev 1y ago
> I think it's a terrible idea to put your entire business in the hands of big tech companies You, me and entire HN is aware of this but who is going to educate millions of people who are already dependent on these services.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  To be fair, we're not talking about millions here, it's genuinely billions. Easily half of the world's population now have internet access, and vanishingly few ever manage to scale the walls of the beautiful gardens big companies graciously built for them.
Clood5 1y ago
[dead]
anang 1y ago
Isn't that the idea behind an alternative to DNS? I think OP meant that we need a similar system based on clear rules and international cooperation for social media, in addition to host names.
thrance 1y ago
> ICANN and the DNS system remains mostly-neutral as it should be With emphasis on mostly. I believe most of the issues we have with DNS and name allocation could be solved if they were managed by an actual international non-profit organization. Alas, ICANN is an American for-profit company, whose corruption needs no more evidence.

tmountain 1y ago

This is an interesting take on the current situation, and I definitely see it here in Portugal. Lots of businesses with signs with only a WhatsApp number and a QR code for payment (MBWay). This said, it seems like any system for discovery will have technical hurdles (a registration process, a way to apply updates, renewals, validation, etc). I agree that the landscape is changing, but it feels very challenging to establish an alternative to something like DNS without a lot of the same hurdles that come with it today. I would like to hear your perspective on what this would look like.

Clood5 1y ago
[dead]

kmacdough 1y ago

But you still get the same problem, no? Limited good WhatsApp handles. Just domains are older, more common internationally and have had longer to be hoarded.

immibis 1y ago
WhatsApp doesn't have handles. Only phone numbers. You print the phone number on a big sign on the front of your business, underneath the name of the business. If your phone number changes, you get a new sign or paint over it.

ahartmetz 1y ago

That seems like a difficult problem to solve if "not having a real website" isn't stigmatized (it totally is as far as I'm concerned). There are hosters that offer a domain + some kind of pre-baked website for like 2-3€ a month, but that's still not free (especially in India) and still not as easy as some social media page / account. Nevertheless, these offerings could be much better and cheaper, especially if there was a reasonably official looking TLD where it's dirt cheap to register a domain name. But is there a business model there? :/

mrweasel 1y ago

AOL keywords? The benefit of DNS is that it's also sort of able to segment out globally, though that mostly works for smaller companies. In many ways Google took over the role of DNS for non-technical people, but it's a little hard to advertise a specific search term. It is still possible to have a business without a domain name, but for e.g. WhatsApp, or Telegram, you're putting yourself into a garden with a wall high enough that even Google can't find you. I have seem more and more companies simply advertise their Facebook or Instagram pages, but that sort of excludes a number of people from their business. Relying on WhatsApp would yield much the same problem. On solution I could see, at least in some countries, is to have the government provide a "landing page" for each company when they register for their business licens. So you'd get tims-trash-removable.business.com when you register your company and you can then put in links to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, email or a phone number. Introducing something completely new would be extremely hard.

qwertox 1y ago

In other words, it would be enough for the chamber of commerce to offer a one-page-per-company index. Pre-populated automatically with all the legally binding contact information and offer a field or two where the company can put their Instagram-like profiles with lots of pictures. And allow people to comment on them. One of the nice things in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) is the obligation to put an imprint on the website [0]. This is valid for every hosted site which runs commercially (even if it is a private blog displaying ads). They must show a phone number, an email address which must be usable as a customer support email (even if it is just named info@...), physical address, who is in charge of the company and other things. Whenever I try to find out whom a website offering some "new AI stuff" belongs to, I'm baffled to see that other countries don't require this. [0] https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/ https://www.porsche.com/germany/legal-notice/

mkmk 1y ago
This is exactly the stuff that prevents innovation and drives entrepreneurs out of those economies. Physical address?!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- oceanhaiyang 1y ago
  Huh? Why would that be harmful at all??
  - croes 1y ago
    Entrepreneurs hate responsibility
    - eadmund 1y ago
      I imagine that most people hate random Internet crazies showing up at their homes. When one starts in a garage, one doesn’t have an office yet.

jiehong 1y ago

That’s a great point. Thinking of IPFS, maybe we shouldn’t refer to content by name and location at once. Perhaps every business gets a UUID, and that’s the official online ID for that business. Link it to a name only for display (or a list of names, for multiple languages). Now there is the question of how to bind that to a location (IP) online as well as IRL. Maybe a map of business with their UUID maintained by governments based on the post office system to validate it IRL?

anshumankmr 1y ago

Well if you are a Jeremy Renner fan, there was just the app for you...

rkagerer 1y ago

Social media platforms aren't the answer, they're the crutch. What you've described tells me it needs to be more straightforward to establish and grow your online presence on a foundation you control (or at least one where the owner has some true accountability to you).

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

doctorhandshake 1y ago

With the acknowledgment that it’s a controversial opinion, I think the most important ‘domain’ tied to our identity is our appearance, most importantly our face. I’ve been advocating for a time that we need to think about a ‘DNS’ that, in discrete, decentralized, decoupled steps, goes from the appearance of real-world things to meaning/language to links to digital things. I’ve also written a little speculative fiction about what that might look like. https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-glass https://open.substack.com/pub/noahnorman/p/all-the-kinds-of-...

sigilis 1y ago
As you get older, or if you get injured or disfigured, what happens? Does your "face card" get declined?
- doctorhandshake 1y ago
  I envision this system as an evolving, fluid mapping of things to hashes, and hashes (or hash-space locations) to meaning, all controlled by users, institutions, experts, and authorities. So if you were to radically change appearance, it’d be down to those who have something to say about you to update where it’s pointed. You raise a good point in general, though, that all kinds of things can change appearance for all kinds of reasons, even to the point of being unrecognizable, and while I can’t think of any examples right now, I bet there are things that do that with some regularity. It’s down to the inputs to the system and their amalgamation into a hash to be robust to that within reason, and the rest of the way for the authors of data to take care of the rest, much in the same way everything written about the artist Prince still applies to him under his later name/symbol, whether it was updated or not. Same for brands that rebrand, countries that change hands, etc.
  - Reubachi 1y ago
    PKI infra and public trust CAs support this already via vetted identity certs. Nowadays these certs require picture ID from some determined compliant government org. IE; your signing, email, encryption certificate public and private key are uniquely tied to your face, name, etc. You can do this privately. I can't think of a negative to this system in terms of risk, bloat, fatigue. All this though assumes you support public certificate authorites and their practices. which is a bit of a walled garden on purpose, and tbh these types of certs aren't really needed right now.

croes 1y ago

Given the recent US administration that‘s a bad idea. With DNS you are somewhat independent, with social media you’re one executive order away from shutting down the whole economy

oaiey 1y ago

Maybe we should register social media handles into the DNS. Then you can advertise your domain and smoothly transition to them. Not exactly solving this, but handles are equally important than web server ip addressses or mail exchange ip addresses.

FireInsight 1y ago
Bluesky is a great working example of this.

James_K 1y ago

The argument that DNS is too hard doesn't really appeal to me. There are a billion and one WYSIWYG websites that let you register a domain and host some static site on it, all from one convenient web interface. I see loads of adverts all over the place for things like Squarespace and Wix. There's nothing hard to grasp about DNS if you offer it to users in an intuitive way. I imagine if Meta gave users a button that let them rent out a domain and have it redirect to their Facebook page, then many would take it up. There are a lot of people already using services like linktr.ee, so I can imagine a market for tying that page to a domain. I think the biggest issue is that people have just gotten used to putting @MY_BUSINESS_NAME in their advertising and it's what most users know how to deal with. I reckon most users have never manually typed a URL into the address bar in their lives.

9dev 1y ago

The issue with DNS isn't that it's too complex; from a purely technical standpoint, it's a fairly simple technology, no more complicated than email, or http. People have created all kinds of abstractions over technology to make it accessible over time. An instagram handle hides a mindbogglingly large amount of complexity going on underneath, and people find that simple enough. It's the administrative part that makes it hard: The registration, the expiration, the distributed responsibility of needing a NIC, registrar, DNS operator, hosting platform, Certificate Authority—we're all used to the bullshit, but getting from "I'd like to present my business under this domain" to presenting your business under this domain requires way too much bureaucracy. The whole process is still stuck in the 90ies: It shouldn't require more than picking a name and providing payment details to get running. Delegation of anything could happen easily via OAuth grants; TLS should just work, given ACME; all other details can be customised if necessary, but normal users should never have to bother with DNS records at all.

0x00cl 1y ago

This is such a weird take. This is not a problem per se on the technical level. > Perhaps we need to rethink discoverability and identity on the internet in ways that are more intuitive for ordinary users Isn't this why search engines became popular in the first place? Because they "solved" discoverability? And before Instagram and WhatsApp existed, they worked fine. Isn't the reason businesses moved to Instagram and WhatsApp is because people moved to those services? and not the other way around.

_fat_santa 1y ago

To all the folks saying this is a terrible idea and you shouldn't put your trust in big tech companies: you're absolutely right but also wrong. This is just one of things that "works" and you can't really get around. Tangentially related but one of my friends started a photo booth rental business and was asking me about how to build his web presence. At first he suggested a website and I told him he should have a website but I also told him that an solid Instagram account (we are in the US) would work just as well. Is it batshit crazy on a conceptual level to get into bed with a big tech company for your web presence? Yeah it absolutely is. But does it actually work and is the most likely way for you to drive sales? Yeah it absolutely is.

carlosjobim 1y ago

> The traditional website + DNS model is simply too complex for most people You assume that business owners should do this themselves, but why? It's very cheap to get a contractor to make you a good website, so that's what business owners should do: contract somebody to do it. That's what business owners also do for signage, print promotion, accounting, machine maintenance, etc. Most things except for breathing i too complex for most people, including for business owners. That's why there's business-to-business professional services.

capitalatrisk 1y ago

I'm very interested to learn more about these WhatsApp only businesses, maybe it could be replicated in the West. Are there any good resources/blogs/people/etc I should look at to learn more?